Not Everything You Do Will Work

Nobody likes to admit failure, but it happens. It’s a time for reflection, for growth, and maybe a little bit of personal whining. Without failures, we wouldn’t always be able to identify our wins, right?

As I hope everyone has figured out by now, we don’t all live in the same time zone. It’s true. Those who live on the East coast get to experience the day before those who live on the West coast. As an event planner, I work with people from all over the country and often have to schedule meetings at all hours of the day. I occasionally end up with a meeting during my lunch hour or at the wee hours of the morning because I miscalculated which direction the time zone I am in is from the time zone of the person I need to meet with (my poor husband, it’s comical how often we have time zone conversations).

To that end, I thought it would be a huge benefit to those attending a recent online event I helped coordinate, if the online platform automatically transitioned to the time zone of the viewer. For example, if the schedule said the event started at 9am Central, and you live in Denver, Colorado, the event platform would automatically adjust to reflect Mountain time, and show YOU that the event started at 8am. After that, the remaining event times would adjust accordingly and no math would need to take place on the side of the attendee. Voila!

Worst. Idea. Ever.

I’m not sure if it’s because we hadn’t done anything like this before; it’s definitely NOT because we didn’t advertise it, email about it, and stress it in bold letters on the website, but we received more emails to our customer service department on this issue alone than pretty much all other issues combined. People were so confused when they viewed the online schedule and saw a different time than the time advertised in the marketing materials. It got to the point we could only laugh about it, because the alternative would have been to cry.

So, please learn from this one. You can have great intentions. You can make decisions with your attendees’ best interests at heart and still fail. Find that thick skin we talked about, laugh at yourself, learn from it, and move on.

Have you tried something you swear was a good idea only to have it flop?
I’d love to hear your story. Please email me.

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